J.E.Lawrie                                                      HINTS-17.
                                                                     v2  

Plain Text
     When is a Pipedream file in "plain text" and why ?
     It  ought  to  be  possible  to  find the answers in the User Manual
     and/or in the various books on the Z88 but I've not seen it  -  bits
     of this and that; pretty useless.
     "Why" is the easiest to explain.  Usually, Pipedream files  are  not
     in  plain  text  otherwise we couldn't retrieve the margin, the page
     length, column widths, etc and spreadsheets would be impossible.

     "When"?   Well,  when  we choose to make it so or when the operating
       system dictates it.

Plain text.
     When a Pipedream file is saved there is the option to select  it  as
     "plain text" - we enter "Y" at the last option if we want it so.
     If  such  a  file is retrieved from RAM it has to be loaded as plain
     text otherwise we only get 12  characters  on  each  line.   We  can
     alter the Options to see the whole text  but column widths, etc  are
     as we would find in a new instantiation of a Pipedream file.

     These files are always saved as plain text -
          a)  all CLI files.
          b)  list files, those special files ending with  .L
          c)  files which will be transferred to another computer
          d)  files  we  create  in  Pipedream  to  be accessed by Basic.
     There are two instances of plain text files created internally -
          e)  data files created from within a Basic program, and
          f)  the S.sgn files originating in :RAM.-

256k EPROM problems
     It  is only recently that I bought a 256k EPROM, only because it was
     cheap I must add!  My first problem was that it would not take  more
     than  50k  of  files.   Several  erasures later (!) I got 156k on it
     before it baulked BUT some files it just would  not  accept.   These
     files had nothing in common and were not exceptional in any way,

     I also found that when a file was repeated there were now TWO, and I
     could, in experimenting, get three and four instances of a file.

     The supplier was only too happy to replace it - in fact, he sent the
     "duff"  one  back  as  well!  But the new one was no better than the
     first - what to do?   The obvious thing was to talk to  someone  who
     knows a lot more than me about the Z88 - Vic Gerhardi of Rakewell.

     He  was surprised that I didn't know of the Z88/256k EPROM "bug"- he
     thought everyone knew that it behaved in a  peculiar  fashion,  even
     causing  hard  resets.  He believes, though not too certain that the
     OZ4 version of the Z88 is O.K. with this EPROM.  A write-up  I  have
     on the "bugs" cured by the OZ4 chip does not mention this one at all

     So,  if  you have, or get a 256k EPROM take care!  Don't try and put
     more than 150k of files into it for a start, and try not to save the
     same filename a second time - call  it  something  else.   And,  the
     "bug" I did know about - don't save a file larger than 64k to it.

                                                                      END

Back to HINTS-INDEX